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Searching for Terry Punchout tells the story of Terry Macallister, a mythical NHL pugilist who set the penalty minutes record before vanishing from the public eye, through the eyes of his son, a magazine writer.

“I was looking at hockey biographies and I thought it’d be funny if someone did one of these on a goon,” Hellard told Postmedia in November. “I didn’t know what to do with it. Then I thought I wanted to write about being from a small town and hating it. Then I merged the two.”

Hellard grew up in Summerside, PEI before moving to Calgary for work after graduating from St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish, N.S.

The winner of the First Novel Award will be announced in a ceremony on May 22 at the Globe and Mail Centre in Toronto.